BAE Systems to lead next-generation surveillance program

ARGUS-IS will be applied to both unmanned and manned surveillance platforms. (Pictured is BAE Systems' fully autonomous HERTI aircraft)

November 9, 2007 BAE Systems will head-up the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Autonomous Real-Time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System (ARGUS-IS) program after the company received an $18.5 million contract to develop a new class of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) technology.

To be applied on both unmanned and manned surveillance platforms, ISR capabilities will be developed for wide-area persistent monitoring that can continuously detect and track the presence and motion of thousands of small or large targets over tens of square miles.

The objectives of the program are to demonstrate real-time surveillance systems that incorporate compact size, a multi-gigapixel, high-resolution sensor; wide-field optics; ultra-high-bandwidth, airborne processing and a ground station for interactive multi-target designation, tracking, and exploitation.

According to Dr. John Antoniades, director of remote sensing technologies for BAE Systems’ Advanced Technologies group: “The ARGUS program will provide a sorely needed, persistent, and robust surveillance capability for many existing ISR airborne platforms.”

“This next generation of real-time surveillance systems will increase wide-area, high-resolution collection capabilities by one to two orders of magnitude over current airborne assets,” said Dr. Steven Wein, director of optical sensor systems for BAE Systems.

After a misspent youth at law school, Noel began to dabble in tech research, writing and things with wheels that go fast. This bus dropped him at the door of a freshly sprouted Gizmag.com in 2002. He has been Gizmag's Editor-in-Chief since 2007. All articles by Noel McKeegan